Smiling Doesn’t Hurt

When someone asks how you feel, your answer actually makes a difference to how you feel. Your brain believes you. Say you are well, and well, you are. It happens almost that fast. You start to think well thoughts. “Hey, I don’t feel so bad really.” You don’t want what you just said to be untrue, after all.

Add a smile to that picture and something even bigger happens. Bob Sutton wrote about the effect of smiling , and his text is backed by rigorous research.

‘“There is now compelling evidence that smiling causes people to feel happy. Requiring people to smile, no matter how they really feel at first, results in increased positive feelings; frowning conversely decreases positive feelings. Robert Zajonc and his colleagues show that smiling leads to physiological changes in the brain that cool the blood, which in turn makes people feel happy. . . . These researchers also found direct effects of temperature on emotion, demonstrating that people who have had cold air blown up their noses are happier than those who have had hot air blown up their noses. Hundreds of other studies show that hot temperatures are a powerful and reliable cause of foul moods and interpersonal conflict (especially aggression and violence).

So, if you want to be really weird, try increasing happiness (and thus creativity) by having your people say “ah, ah, ah,” “e, e ,e, e,” or perhaps saying “cheese” over and over again, blowing cold air up their noses, or just keeping the buildings cold where creative people work. Or as Jane Dutton at The University of Michigan told me after she heard Robert Zajonc talk about these ideas: “When I want to get in a good mood, I’ll just go home and stick my head in the refrigerator.”’

The moral seems to be if you see unhappy folks, you’re okay to tell them gently to stick their heads in a refrigerator.

Liz Strauss